


Companions and Eventualities 7 -- Speculations

by Viola_Laterra



Series: Companions and Eventualities [7]
Category: Enderal (Video Game)
Genre: Brave New World Ending, F/M, M/M, Other, Post-Canon, Spoilers for Brave New World ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:53:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25103482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Viola_Laterra/pseuds/Viola_Laterra
Summary: Up in the Star City, the Prophet and Jespar work to find a way to learn more about what is going on on the surface of Vyn, and discuss who might still be down there.(Takes place five years after Brave New World Ending)(Wherein I speculate about what various things from the game might imply in the larger world's mechanics, in the form of a conversation between Jespar and the Prophet.)
Relationships: Jespar Dal'Varek/Prophet | Prophetess
Series: Companions and Eventualities [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1809244
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	Companions and Eventualities 7 -- Speculations

I was in a precarious position, leaning out over open space, when I heard the characteristic crackle of the Starling communicator devices we'd salvaged.

"All right, I'm ready when you are," Jespar's voice came through, scratchy and metallic.

I swore as I almost lost my grip on the cable I was trying to feed through an anchor. I managed to regain focus, complete that operation, and then pull the cable with me back to the place where I needed to connect it.

Once that was done, I sighed and reached down to my belt where I'd attached the Starling communicator, unclipped it and pressed the button that transmitted sound, and said, "It's ready here too. Go ahead and flip the switch."

"Got it," he responded. I waited for a few moments, until I heard the telltale hum of power in the mechanical hub next to me. I had no way to check whether information was traveling on the cable I had connected, but Jespar would know in a moment or two whether this had worked.

While I waited for him to observe the system's behavior, I took a moment to look out over the dizzying expanse of sky below me. It was a stormy day down in the Frostcliff Mountains -- I could see lightning flashes and thick cloud cover to the east. On the western side, though, the coast was quite clear and the snowy front face of the mountains was shining unbearably brightly in the sun, even at this distance. The Star City floated above the mountains far enough away from Ark that we couldn't see what had happened to the majority of Enderal. But in the years that had followed our flight to the City, the cloud cover had slowly dissipated and most days we could at least make out the mountains.

Our attention had turned to the question of who and what might still be down there. So, though it had taken us three years of working with the Starling technology to concoct a way to try to see beyond our own abilities, and a further year to assemble the parts, we had finally managed to design and construct something that might function a bit like the Black Guardian's "Eye" which had allowed him to perceive the goings on at the surface and to some degree all the way up here in the sky.

Today should be pretty exciting, I thought. We'd tested our sensors and the information transmission system in the city, and we were both fairly certain that we'd be able to get some kind of idea about what was down there, today. I found myself almost vibrating with the need to know. Had anything survived? Or had my choice resulted in the destruction of all organic life on the planet, as everyone had said back then?

I almost jumped when the communicator activated and Jespar said, "I'm definitely getting something up here, so some part of it worked. But I think you'd better get up here and take a look at the results."

I nodded to myself and responded to him, "All right, I'll be there soon." It would take a few hours for me to make it from the belly of the city all the way back up to the tower where we had found the equipment we thought we could restore and modify for the task.

I had been the one to come down here and hang out over space because my dexterity was better than Jespar's. That hadn't been the case, when we'd first met. He had always been faster than I, but over the last couple of years, he'd seemed to slow a little. Neither of us talked about it. As I climbed back up through the tunnels at the bottom of the city and into the lower levels, I thought to myself, neither of us wanted to face his mortality. Especially because I'd already seen him die once, and that was long before he'd come to mean this much to me. That was before he was the only other person alive in the world. And I promptly pushed the thoughts away. I re-focused my mind on the technical details of the modification we'd just made to the city's sensor array, and managed to keep myself busy thinking about that until I climbed up the last flight of stairs into the control room where Jespar would be waiting for me.

Stepping inside, I gazed at him across the room for a minute as he studied the readouts, apparently lost in thought. Then he glanced over and saw me, and said, "Ah! Welcome back. You've got to see this... I'm not *quite* sure how to interpret it, but I do think the sensors are working."

I nodded and walked over to him, but as he leaned past me to point at something, I stopped him, wrapped my arms around him, and kissed him, hard. He responded readily enough, but when I was done, he leaned back and said, laughing, "Now what was that about?"

I shook my head, unwilling to admit how much it had hurt to contemplate losing him again, even if it was only for a brief moment. The best thing I could think to say was, "Something about hanging out over open space for a few hours makes you appreciate what you have."

Jespar laughed and shook his head at me. "All right, you know I'm all for philosophy, but you really want to see this." I laughed too and said, "Of course. Show me."

He walked me through what the different readouts showed. We had set up the sensors to show life on the City, first. So we knew what the lines and symbols looked like that represented the plants and animals that survived up here with us, and we knew how our own existence registered, as well. We'd never been as sure about that, because my readings often showed a kind of echo or lag that surely had to do with my fleshlessness, and Jespar's had looked different from the other life forms here. We didn't understand the Starling technology well enough to know what that meant -- there was a lot to differ between a human and an animal, of course, but we still weren't sure how those differences might show up in these readings.

Aimed down at the mountains and the Crystal Forest (or what had been the Crystal Forest), however, the readings showed... life of some kind? perhaps some plant life, or simple animal life? But the signs fluctuated with time. There one moment, and gone the next.

"Could it be some kind of interference? Some... leftover energy from the Cleansing?" Jespar offered.

I nodded at him. "That could be. But does it mean that there is life, or there isn't? What if we haven't got the sensors right and it's just the life we're detecting up here, reflecting back somehow? And there's no life down there?"

Jespar sighed and rested his elbows on the control console, putting his chin on a partially-curled fist. After a while, he said, "Well, it's only been five years. It could take a long time for life to flourish again down there. Maybe there's *something* down there, but not much."

I nodded. I was feeling more disappointed by this inconclusive evidence than I'd expected. We'd already had so many false starts in trying to get these sensors working. I suppose I hadn't realized just how strongly I wanted to know what had happened down there... maybe I felt more guilt about my choice than I had imagined. Did that mean the High Ones were somehow controlling me, still, then?

I adjusted one of the dials on one of the sensors, which broadened the area it was receiving information from, but made it less precise as to what it was detecting. The fluctuations continued, but they were a little smoother, a little more constant. Of course, I knew that was only because I'd changed the settings. I sighed, resigned to my disappointment. 

Jespar took his elbows off the table and stood up, pacing the length of the control console. "Except... something about the Cycle has never made sense to me. How can the High Ones engineer it so perfectly every time? Out of all the eventualities there are, surely there must be many where they can't quite get it right? So much depends on so many little things. Are we somehow so unlucky as to be in the only eventuality where they've gotten it exactly right every time?"

I sighed and said, "But they have many failsafes. If Coarek didn't drive Arantheal to light the Beacon, then Yuslan did. And even if I hadn't led them to the specific places I did at the times I did, there were others working to do the same things I was. They would have found the Word of the Dead, they would have found the Black Stones, they would have done it all... just slower. And it turns out there's no time limit... just however long it takes until the Emperor is tipped over the edge enough to light the Beacon without the Numinos."

Jespar nodded impatiently. "Yes, but... also think about the scenes in the Starling history of the Pyreans... it depicts the new humans as if they just appear there. How long do you think it really takes humans to... how did you say the Black Guardian put it? Come from 'simple forms of life'? To the point where you have the ills of society, of so many people in close contact, that gives the High Ones their power? *And* the technology to find or build a Beacon? Is ten thousand years long enough for that?"

I didn't have a good answer. "I don't know," I said.

Jespar went on: "The Cleansing is clearly works through some kind of magic, somehow -- the High Ones can create Emissaries, and can absorb human consciousness. Those things don't just happen by themselves. Maybe the entire Cycle is magically driven, including the start? So maybe there *could* be life down there. There's just so much we don't understand."

I nodded again, silent. I changed the sensors back to their more precise settings. I sat and watched the lights blink, until suddenly I saw something I hadn't noticed so far.

"Jespar, look -- that one signal, it seems stronger than the others. More consistent? And much more like a human pattern. What could it be?" I mused, looking at a place south of the Crystal Forest.

We both stared silently at it for a moment. Then Jespar exclaimed, "By the Wise Hermit! How could we have forgotten?!"

"What?" I asked. "What is it?"

Jespar eyed me cautiously. "The Living Temple, of course. She... she should have survived this Cleansing, just as she survived the Pyreans.'"

Dumbfounded, I sat back on the stool behind me in shock. Of course. "You're right," I said to him. "How could I have forgotten?" Constantine had explained to us that the Pyreans had known how to bind a human consciousness to a place or object, and that the Living Temple was just such a place. And he'd sought to speak with that consciousness, and we thought it had driven him mad... except that now, I realized, she had simply shown Constantine the truth of the Cycle, and the truth of what I was... and that was why he'd tried to kill me. I thought bitterly, maybe it would have been better for him to succeed. Maybe Arantheal wouldn't have been able to trigger the Cleansing, after all.

I sighed and dragged myself back to the present. Of course there was nothing to do about the past, anymore. What was done was done, and Constantine lay buried in the Temple where we'd left him. Probably nothing but bones, now.

Jespar put a hand on my arm. He said, "Are there other Pyreans like that? What did Constantine call them? Bound Ones?"

He was trying to distract me. I covered his hand with mine, and gave it a squeeze. I appreciated the comfort; he somehow knew when I was thinking about how it had all ended, down there, and could usually get me to think about something else. I said to him, "I don't know of any, but you're the Endralean-born one here."

Jespar gave a short laugh and turned back to the readouts. "I didn't know of any. The Living Temple was the only sort of place like that that I'd ever heard of. And I was just as surprised as you to learn from Constantine what it really was... not just haunted, but actually inhabited by a consciousness." I watched the little green light flicker on and off, the one we thought indicated plant life, next to the orange one that we thought indicated human-like life. It was weaker, and it did flicker, but less than the green one. I adjusted the direction the sensor was pointed, aiming closer to the coast, and the orange light went off definitively. The green light kept flickering.

"Of course," Jespar added, "The Pyreans were not the only ones to know how to separate mind from body... the Black Guardian managed it, and he was before the Pyreans."

"But we killed him," I said. 

"Sure, but it means that others could have done it. So, who else might still be alive down there, who wasn't tied to an organic body?"

We were silent, watching the readouts. Who else? Suddenly, I remembered. "Pathira," I said. "Who?" Jespar asked. I looked at him. "A Starling. She and her master, Dal'Terrowin, were both trying to do the same thing the Black Guardian was. Transfer themselves into a mechanical body. And she succeeded, and tried to kill her master -- and me -- but we damaged the body and removed her. She should still be intact in whatever vessel Dal'Terrowin put her in... unless the Red Madness took him and he destroyed her, near the end."

Jespar looked around us at the room full of Starling technology, thinking. "What about him? Would he have taken her place in the mechanical body?" 

I shook my head. "I don't know. The body, 'Horst' he called it, was heavily damaged when we stopped Pathira. But I don't know... Starlings work fast, and he would have been pretty motivated, with the city coming down around him. So... it's possible."

"I wonder if there are any other Starlings who managed something like that," Jespar mused. "I don't know," I said.

And we were both silent for a moment, and Jespar turned back to face the readouts again, tapping a finger on his chin as he watched them fluctuate. He reached forward and adjusted the controls that changed where the sensors were aimed; we couldn't aim as far as Ark, yet, but with some additional modifications, eventually we thought we would be able to do so.

I watched him for a while as he systematically searched the area that was in range, trying to figure out what it was that was bothering me -- something I'd forgotten, something that seemed to be very important... It had been lingering around the corners of my mind...

Suddenly it solidified. "Gajus," I said.

"What?" Jespar said as he fiddled with the sensors.

"Master Gajus," I elaborated. "The Aged Man."

Jespar stopped what we was doing and turned to look at me. "What about him?"

I paused, letting my thoughts form up more clearly. "I... I think... he might have been an Emissary."

"What?" Jespar's shock at this statement was unsurprising, I realized. "All right, explain," he asked me, crossing his arms.

"Well..." I thought through what I remembered about our encounter with Gajus. "First of all, not only did he know about the Cycle, but he clearly knew a lot more than we did."

Jespar nodded, but said, "That's hardly conclusive, though."

I said, "Sure. But do you remember what he said to me? He told me that I hadn't questioned why I was suddenly humanity's savior, when I had been nothing. That's consistent with how the Black Guardian described the way the Emissaries are created. And..." I actually started to feel excited by this idea. "And he called himself a fleshless eye!"

Jespar nodded again, more slowly this time. "The legends said that he should be centuries old, and yet he looked... what, not much older than you and I? And the Black Guardian said that Emissaries don't age." He paused, thinking. Then: "Do you still have that note from his study? The one that gave you the clues to the books that let you into the sanctum?"

I thought for a moment, and said, "I might. Wait here... you could keep refining the targeting of the sensors?" "Sure," he said.

I went down the stairs and off down the hallway to the right. It was worth the 20 minute round trip to our living quarters, where I kept all the random assortment of objects I'd brought with me from Enderal.

As I walked, I recalled more and more of the experience at Gajus' manor. The strange wooden puppets, or sculptures... they reminded me, now, of what the bodies twisted by the Cleansing looked like. Gajus had said that art overcomes the barriers of what we don't want to see. Could he have had to watch his own world burn, as we had, and his way of dealing with it was to create these... frozen moments? To get them out of his head, and into some physical form?

And... he had known we were coming. He had known what I was trying to do. Could it be he had been a Prophet, too? His art and music had a quality to them that reminded me of both the Echo and my own disturbing dreams... Certainly if he had been the Emperor, or the Traitor, he would have perished in the end of the Cycle, because the Traitor's sole purpose was to stay close to the Emperor and thwart them, to cause them to light the Beacon. And the Emperor, having lit the Beacon, would always be right there when the Cleansing happened -- and their sin one of pride, in one form or another... they wouldn't be the one to try to escape, as I had. I suppose the Invader, who brings the final mad war upon the Emperor, could have survived... but Coarek had *wanted* to trigger the Cleansing. If he was at all typical of other Cycles, then he'd likely welcome the Cleansing right up until the last moment. 

So surely Gajus was a Prophet, or some other Emissary we didn't know of yet... And if he were a Prophet, maybe he had seen an Echo of me coming to him for the Word of the Dead. Maybe it had meant he had seen himself doing the same thing? My mind was a tangle of ideas, each trying to sort itself all at once, a tumult of insight which somehow still didn't bring clarity.

Lost in thought, I was surprised to see that I'd already arrived at our quarters. I went to the chest in our bedroom where I kept all the artifacts of my experiences. I pulled out my journal -- I doubted I had written anything illuminating in there, but it was worth a look at whatever I had recorded from the time we'd spent at Gajus' mansion. I leafed through the odd scraps of paper I'd kept... even the three notes from Adila to Jespar. I didn't really think he'd want to see them again, but they were the last evidence of his sister, so I'd thought to at least hold onto them, just in case... well. I eventually found the note from Gajus' study, and after quickly scanning it to confirm that it was the right one, I immediately turned back to go rejoin Jespar.

On the walk back, I remembered what the woman in the water, down in Gajus' sanctum, had said: "All this time... I can hardly imagine how hard that must be for you. But I still believe in our dream." She must have been his companion, who he'd preserved somehow... if he really was a projection, like me, then he was at least many thousands of years old. What would it be like, to fall in love with a human at some point during that thousand years, and then to face losing them? What... what would I do, when it was time for me to let go of Jespar? For the second time today, I pushed that thought away.

And just in time, because I'd arrived back at the control room. "Anything new?" I asked Jespar. He shook his head. He said, "Did you find it?" A strange flash of memory came to me... the dreams of Daddy asking me the same question.

I shook my head to clear it and said, "Yes," handing him the note. Jespar spread it out on the console next to the controls. He read aloud, slowly: 

"My dear friend.

It is such a delight to hear from you again.

I don't wish to lie to you - but my hopes are limited.  
At first the changes in Nehrim seemed so promising, but now everything is back at its old pace. I am concerned for you too, dear friend. I value you as a man of strong character, but your last letter kept me worrying.

Don't forget what led to my ruin back then. Pride was my fall. Don't let my mistake be the same as yours.

In brotherly love,  
Gajus"

Jespar was silent for a moment. Then he started nodding, a little absently. I knew that was a sign that he was thinking hard about what this all meant. I came and stood next to him, put a hand on his shoulder as he sat at the console, and re-read the note over his shoulder.

Eventually, he said to me, "Do you think he thought he could stop the Cycle?" 

"I still believe in our dream," the woman in the water had said. I looked over at Jespar and said, "Yes, I think he did think he could stop it, at least at some point. But... he already didn't think he could tell me anything that would make a difference -- that was why he didn't just explain to me what was going on -- so... maybe our Cycle was not the first time he thought he could change things, and realized he couldn't."

"'Pride was my fall,'" Jespar mused. "In his original Cycle, do you think?" "I would assume so," I answered. The pride of thinking he could save the world, without knowing the truth of what was going on? Maybe he *had* suspected that it was too strange, what had happened to him, and when he saw the Beacon lit, and saw that he wasn't as affected as the others... 

Jespar was stuck on the same question I was. "But how did he survive? How did he learn the truth? The Black Guardian told you he'd never before met a projection that survived the Cleansing." Jespar had a point. I agreed. Could Gajus have realized it on his own? That seemed possible but unlikely...

I said, "I have to assume that the Veiled Woman was involved. But apparently not in the same way as she was with me. And..." a thought suddenly occurred to me. "I've been thinking that she'd mostly intervened to first get me killed, on the ship, and then to save me and send me to the Black Guardian, at the end of the last Cycle... but she also intervened to save you. And because she did that, you were there to save me from the Black Guardian, too."

"Master of eventualities," Jespar murmured. It was the phrase we'd come up with to describe her, years ago.

"At any rate," I said, picking up the letter and reading it yet again, "He clearly told others about the Cycle. This person, he's written to, here. And his companion, too, I think."

Jespar shuddered a little. "You mean the preserved woman in the basement you told me about?" "Yes," I answered.

He said, "I know I wouldn't want to be kept alive like that." I heard the disgust and fear in his voice and decided I'd better shift the topic away from the woman in the water.

"So do we think he's still alive down there somewhere?" I asked.

Jespar looked back at the readouts, fiddled with them a little bit. I noted that he'd gotten the signal to be sharper, but that just made the intermittent nature of the signs of life even more apparent. At length, he said, "I'll bet he is. If he's stuck it out through this many Cycles, and he had hope as late as Nehrim... I think maybe he'd still be around for the next Cycle. He clearly has some way to survive the Cleansing. Hell, for all we know, he could be up here somewhere, just someplace we haven't found yet."

That was a disquieting thought. After years on our own, the idea of someone else being up here with us felt almost... invasive. I said, "Well, we know what my life signs look like... so we could sweep the Star City, look to see if there is anything else like that here."

Jespar assented. Then he said, "But do you think he would help us? He sounded pretty bitter about the whole situation. He wouldn't help us, back then."

I sat on the stool across from him and thought about it. "Maybe. And who knows... maybe as the High Ones become more powerful, they're able to constrain what the projections do, somehow."

Jespar sighed. "I suppose we won't know until we get to that point in the Cycle again. Do you think he gave us the Word of the Dead in hopes that we might actually get a Numinos, this time, to properly arm the Beacon and stop the Cleansing?"

I shook my head. "I don't know. But I do remember him saying maybe we could stop it, but 'time will tell.'" Well, time had told.

We were silent for a few more moments, each lost in thought. But then Jespar said, "Well, I'm hungry. It's definitely dinnertime, and I believe it is your turn to cook." I laughed and nodded. "Then you should really get to it," he said, teasing.

"You know you'll get a better result if you at least keep me company," I told him. He nodded, mock-sighed, and said, "If I must."

We headed back to the living quarters, and as we set about making dinner, I thought to myself that even though we hadn't found conclusive signs of life on the surface, we did have some evidence that we were not the only beings left alive on the planet. And of those who had survived, we all knew, or could be made to believe, the realities of the Cycle. The idea that in several thousand years, perhaps we could work together to stop the next one... well, it was still a wild hope. Who knew if it was even possible to work with the Living Temple, in her rage and grief, or with the Aged Man, in his bitter apathy. But it was a hope, nonetheless.

**Author's Note:**

> "My mind was a tangle of ideas, each trying to sort itself all at once, a tumult of insight which somehow still didn't bring clarity."
> 
> This was how I felt when we finished the game. :)


End file.
